About Karen Halverson

Karen Halverson’s photographs document the relationship between human construction and dramatic landscapes, particularly in the American West. Halverson first became enamored with the West during a road trip to Stanford University in the late 1950s. She returned to the Northeast for her post-graduate studies, and studied photography with Garry Winogrand and Joel Meyerowitz in New York. Her photographs capture the striking landscapes of places such as the Utah desert, Santa Monica Mountains, and Iceland, and include traces of human activity—a sign, building, or car—that interrupt the natural environment. “I was drawn to human artifacts in the landscape—perhaps in reaction to the tradition of seeing landscape as ‘pure,’ or because human artifacts establish a sense of time—the here and now,” Halverson has said.